January 28th, 2006

I use a Hipster PDA. I must confess I needed some framework though, and chose to use the D*I*Y Planner to keep my shiznat together.

Anyways. All this shuffling around with index cards sent me back to my youth, and my brief flirtation with magic. No, not of the ‘The Gathering’ persuasion, but the more widely experienced sawing-a-loady-in-half flavour. Although I never tried that, I could never seem to find volunteers…

Yeah, I wasn’t very good. However, my point is one thing I learned about was the use of Keycards – specific cards you could use to find a place in a deck of cards when you riffle through them, making it easier to cut a deck at a specific point for the requirements of a trick.

This is the sort of thing I figure could be useful for my Hipster PDA, for finding specific parts of the deck when I need to. I’ve already separated my Next Action lists from my Projects, Calendars, and Someday-Maybe lists with separator cards of varying colour, and have just hacked the dividers so that each one is two index cards glued together. This I hope will make it easier to find cards in the deck without having to use troublesome tabs or paperclips.

Other examples within my ‘Pocket Book of Magic’ (Peter Eldin, published by Kingfisher), include p[aperclips, lengthened cards, or crimping. However, these all involved tabs and things sticking out the end of the deck which I would prefer to avoid. Having said that, I might eventually try the ‘long card’ trick, but I would rather not have anything sticking out of my hipster to get caught.

Perhaps once you are capable of writing with some conviction and able to venture past the insecure-confessional (“Gosh…gee….I can’t believe I’ve done this”) format will you be able to change the title of your blog to “published author.” Nothing is more annoying to a potential reader than a writer who doesn’t believe in himself.